Japan General Discussion

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I can't believe Abe is still in office.

Uh, okay. Feel free to elaborate on why not.

I was surprised when he initially won LDP leadership again, but since he did, it's far from surprising that he's still there.

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I'm surprised he hasn't resigned for no reason like the 17 guys who came before him.

That's a shallow reading of recent Japanese political history. In fact, it's so shallow that other shallow readings suffer by comparison to it.

Noda resigned because he lost an election, Kan resigned because...there were a lot of reasons (which is, in case you hadn't noticed, the opposite of 'no reason'), Hatoyama resigned because he broke a major campaign promise and it caused a fracas, Asō resigned because he lost an election, Fukuda's resignation I'll grant you because it genuinely did kind of come out of nowhere, and Abe resigned the first time because his approval ratings tanked after two successive agriculture ministers left office in unfortunate circumstances (the first killed himself and the second was implicated in a financial scandal) and his health at the time was too poor for him to stick it out. Before that you have Koizumi, who was in power for five years, a long time by Japanese standards; Mori, who was a ridiculously flagrant, obvious, and prolific HP; Obuchi, who fell into a coma and died; Hashimoto, who lasted two and a half years before getting his ass kicked in a House of Councilors election; Murayama, whose shaky coalition couldn't hold together; Hata, whose shaky coalition couldn't hold together; Hosokawa, who got hit with a banking scandal; Miyazawa, who lost an election; Kaifu, whose faction within the LDP proved to be too small to pass his policies; Uno, who got hit with a sex scandal; and Takeshita, who got hit with an insider trading scandal.

That covers the 'seventeen guys who came before' Abe's current term. As you can see, Japanese politics is both a good deal more interesting and makes a lot more sense than you're making it out to sound. It can seem too arcane to pay attention to at times, but, much like Italian politics, it rewards looking behind the scenes and keeping in mind that who holds the office of Prime Minister and who is actually in power are not always and in all places the same.

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I'm surprised he's not been implicated in a minor scandal or had his popularity decline due to global economic factors out of his control.

It hasn't even been two years.

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LDP = Bad

There are a few good apples in a bad barrel, but the proverb doesn't work backwards, so yes, I agree.

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This doesn't follow.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

LDP = Bad

There are a few good apples in a bad barrel, but the proverb doesn't work backwards, so yes, I agree.

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This doesn't follow.

The DPJ was thrown out of office for no reason, unless the Tsunami and Fukushima were somehow their fault.

Please read these articles; they explain (some facets of) what went wrong better than I can.

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That's an entirely fair assessment but the LDP's awfulness doesn't make the DPJ good.

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I just found out that the JRP no longer exists, as of a few weeks ago. Apparently Ishihara wasn't on board with Hashimoto's proposed merger with a more centrist (and pacifist!) minor outfit called the Unity Party (which, in turn, had split from Your Party/Minna no Tō last year) and left over the summer with about a third of the JRP to form something called the 'Party for Future Generations'; in September the rump JRP merged with the Unity Party to form the 'Japan Innovation Party'.

Two thoughts:

1. The Japanese far right is as fractious as some countries' far lefts these days.
2. If I saw these as the names of political parties in a work of fiction, I'd decry them as hokey and unreal-sounding.

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I'm no expert on Ainu issues--I wish I knew more about them, really!--but as far as I know the answer is 'not too great'. There's been talk of attempted linguistic revival but I don't know what's come of that.

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As of July, it stood at 47%, with 38% disapproving, which only the second time it's been under fifty per cent since his election (a December 2013 poll put him at 49%-34%). It's since risen back into the fifties but is still well below where it was through most of 2013. Selectively reinterpreting Article 9 to allow for a defense buildup turned out to actually be pretty unpopular, among other things. The TPP also remains broadly hated.

The LDP is still far ahead in all polls on voting intentions for the next election, generally finding itself in the high thirties or low forties. Keep in mind that the DPJ, which has clawed its way back into place as the more-or-less undisputed second-most-popular party (the implosion-cum-schism, or schism-cum-implosion, of the odious JRP can't be hailed enough, in my opinion), is at between five and seven per cent in most of these, and the perennially popular 'shiji-nashi' (no/without-support/endorsement/approval) is neck-and-neck with the LDP. These surreally anemic numbers for essentially every party have been the way in Japanese opinion polling for a while now.

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Could the large number of undecided voters be because Japanese polling firms don't prod the voters enough?

Possibly. Technically the question that's asked isn't 'for which party will you vote?' but 'of which party do you most approve?' Shiji is the word used for both Cabinet approval ratings and party races.

Also of note: Japan doesn't really have any independent polling firms. Almost all polls are conducted by the country's major newspapers--which still enjoy broad circulation and robust relationships with their readership, in part because of the top-heavy population pyramid and in part because they've been much more on-the-ball about making digital incarnations of themselves available than newspapers in many other countries--or in some cases television news networks.

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You know, it's not really clear. In the 2012 general election the undecided voters eventually dispersed roughly evenly amongst all parties, whereas in the 2013 upper house election they mostly dispersed among the opposition parties, leaving the LDP-NKP coalition only slightly outperforming its polling average.

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It disbanded at the end of last year. I'm pretty sure Abe Tomoko (no relation to the Prime Minister) was its last remaining Diet member.

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Abe is considered an independent now, although I've heard something to the effect that she still identifies herself with the otherwise-defunct Tomorrow Party. I'm not sure but I don't think any of their upper house members survived the 2013 election; if they did, they're independents too. Kamei is an independent.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I looked around Japanese Wikipedia for a bit and apparently there is still one former Green Wind member around in the upper house, Kanda Kuniko. She's in Your Party now.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Abe and his government are currently embroiled in their worst crisis since he became Prime Minister again. Last month, he appointed five new women ministers to the Cabinet. While this was an admirable gesture for what it was and particularly welcome in the context of Abe's so far seemingly well-intentioned attempts to make up for his dismal record on women's issues during his first premiership, none of their tenures have gone well, and Abe has left himself open to accusations of, among other things, tokenism.

Two of the new ministers--Economy, Trade, and Industry Minister Obuchi Yūko (daughter of Keizō, Prime Minister 1998-2000, whose seat in exurban/rural Gunma she's held since his death) and Justice Minister Matsushima Midori--resigned yesterday over campaign finance scandals (Obuchi's staff embezzled and distributed campaign monies as personal gifts, allegedly without her personal involvement; Matsushima improperly distributed thousands and thousands of paper fans with her likeness and policy platform on them to her constituents at a festival); of the remaining three--Interior Minister Takaichi Sanae, National Public Safety Commission Chairman and North Korean Abductions Advisor Yamatani Eriko, and Arimura Haruko, who's Special Minister for, concurrently, Regulatory Reform, Food Safety, the Declining Birthrate, and Gender Equality--all visited the Yasukuni Shrine the other day, and Yamatani has come under fire for associations with Zainichi Tokken wo Yurusanai Shimin no Kai ('Association of Citizens Who Won't Forgive/Excuse Special Privileges for Ethnic Koreans'), which is exactly the sort of group you'd expect it to be (unless you would expect it to be violent. It's more Front National than Golden Dawn, thank God). Naturally, these sorts of associations are especially damning for a minister whose portfolio by its very nature is intimately concerned with Korea.

Furthermore Takaichi may or may not have neo-Nazi sympathies.

Arimura is alone in not really having done anything wrong besides the Yasukuni visit. She also has a Master of Arts in Conflict Transformation from the School for International Training in Vermont. Let's see if she can put it to use to get her and her colleagues out of this shitstorm.

This is particularly saddening to me in the case of Obuchi, who before this broke was one of my favorite LDP politicians (which is, for once, not actually intended as damning with faint praise). She was widely visible and highly popular, was considered a leading moderate in the government, and was seen as one of the likeliest possibilities to be Japan's first woman Prime Minister. She was also intended to act as a comforting and palatable face for the plans to restart Japan's nuclear reactors. Personally, I'm not really mourning Matsushima because Matsushima was a wingnut anyway (she once seriously floated the idea of giving sex offenders what was essentially the A Clockwork Orange treatment) and replacing Tanigaki Sadakazu with her was a bad idea in the first place.

Matsushima's been replaced by Kamikawa Yōko, an uncontroversial-seeming longtime backbencher from Shizuoka about whom I know nothing. Obuchi's been replaced by Miyazawa Yōichi, a similarly obscure Councillor and former Representative from Hiroshima.

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The sooner the idea that (unfair, regressive) consumption taxes are somehow a particularly salutary method of revenue generation gets out of the collective head of the worldwide governing classes, the better.

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I can only assume it's next-to-nonexistent, because Matsushima's fan distribution shenanigans and Takaichi's pictures with the leader of the National Socialist Japanese Workers' Party (of whose identity she since claimed to have been not entirely aware at the time that they were taken), at least, showed up after pretty cursory investigation.

It should, in fairness, be noted that Matsushima almost certainly could have survived the fan thing, she just chose not to.

ETA: This gets worse, by the way. Abe had to apologize to the leader of Kōmeitō for making them (Kōmeitō) look bad by association; the new Defense Minister, Eta Akinori, is in trouble for improperly revising his expense reports; the new Agriculture Minister, Nishikawa Kōya, has had to divest from a livestock concern involved in an investment scam; the new Health Minister, Shiozaki Yasuhisa, has had to deny influence-peddling for an old folks' home in his constituency; and Tanigaki described Obuchi as 'a symbol of women’s active participation in society' in a context that made it clear that her loss as such is projected to be incredibly damaging to the government.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Abe is no longer in office by the end of the year if this goes on. (Not to overstate the case--I wouldn't be surprised if he is still in office either.)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Abe is no longer in office by the end of the year if this goes on. (Not to overstate the case--I wouldn't be surprised if he is still in office either.)

If he's out, who do you think will replace him?

I've heard murmurs about Suga Yoshihide (ugh) and Kishida Fumio (meh), but I don't have a good track record of predicting LDP leadership changes. If I did, Tanigaki would have been Prime Minister for the past two years.

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God, I hope not.

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A bunch of Japanese firms and government agencies have offered to help develop a new capital for Andhra Pradesh. Japanese-Indian relations have long been a special area of interest for Abe.

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The newly appointed industry minister Yoichi Miyazawa which replaced Yuko Obuchi who herself quit after a few days due to another scandal admitted that his underlings had spent office cash at a S&M sex bar.

Oh dear Jesus this is great.

On the other hand I really doubt any of these scandals will lead to Shinzō Abe's departure.  What took him down last time was not the scandals per say but scandals PLUS DPJ led alliance taking over the upper house.  Once the scandals hit, the DPJ was justified in blocking everything that the Shinzō Abe regime was doing on the principle that these scandals proved that Shinzō Abe lost the right to rule.  Such a situation is not in place today with the opposition parties still nowhere in terms of being able to join forces and challenge LDP.  Unless LDP sees a danger of losing the next round of elections, Shinzō Abe is safe.

I don't have a good track record of predicting LDP leadership changes.

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"Japan General Discussion" should be banned from any self-respecting English-speaking website.

Bullsh**t. A cabinet reshuffle is going more pear-shaped than I've seen or heard of any cabinet reshuffle going since Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives. This is comedy, this is drama, this is everything we (or, at least, I) follow international politics for. It wouldn't be self-respecting of us not to have this thread.

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Japanese officials have arrived in North Korea for talks on the abduction issue. I'm not optimistic.

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A chapter of the Izokukai, a powerful conservative interest group representing the families of the Japanese dead of World War II, now supports removing Class A war criminals from Yasukuni, or at least in some way 'separating' them from the other souls enshrined there.

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(The title of the New York Times article might give the false impression that the Izokukai as a whole has embraced this proposition; it is in fact just the Fukuoka chapter.)

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I thought I'd do a complete list of all parties represented in the lower house, their rough numbers of seats, and their general ideologies. Descriptions of parties that existed two years ago will be generally based on those that I gave in the 'Japan 2012' thread back then, but may differ in wording.

Party standings in the lower house (ruling party in bold, coalition partner in italics):

Liberal Democratic Party (big-tent conservative, with factions ranging from traditionalist to neoliberal to historical-revisionist to what could almost be considered Right-Hegelian; has been in power for all but six of the past sixty years): 293
Democratic Party of Japan ('Third Way', big-tent, essentially governed as generic (and incompetent) 'reformists' while in power from 2009 to 2012): 55
Japan Innovation Party (Nationalist, neoconservative, populist, would be unambiguously far-right had it not absorbed a more moderate party in recent months): 41
Kōmeitō (Nichiren Buddhist, religious conservatives in the Japanese context, center-right, dovish whereas the LDP is generally hawkish): 31
Party for Future Generations (unambiguously far-right, split from the Innovation Party over the latter's absorption of the more moderate party): 19
Your Party (neoliberal and generically reformist): 9
Japanese Communist Party ('Eurocommunist' except it's not Europe): 8
People's Life Party (Ozawa Ichirō appreciation life): 7
Social Democratic Party ('Third Way' and more committedly so than the DPJ): 3
New Party Daichi (was a ragtag bunch of misfits except now there's only one misfit left): 1

Speaker and Vice-Speaker: 2
Independents: 11

The government now has a notional majority of 326-154 out of 480, counting the Speaker and Vice-Speaker since Japan to the best of my knowledge uses Speaker Denison's rule.

The notional majority was 327-153 after the last general election.

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IIRC New Party Daichi drop the "True Democrats" part of there name.

You're right. Edited to reflect that.

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Thanks! Depending on interest, these posts will probably end up being a fortnightly or monthly series.

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Random question; what exactly is the Nippon Kaigi? I've just read about it now and the New York Times paints it out to be rather "ominous" and comprising a majority of the House of Representatives.

It's a historical revisionist nonparty organization/interest group. I'm not entirely sure if a majority of the House of Representatives is affiliated with it, but a majority of the Cabinet definitely is. All told it has several tens of thousands of members around Japan, many of whom are Shinto priests--it supports a return to State Shinto and is thus a deeply religious, almost theocratic, organization in a way that roundly contradicts the stated beliefs and positions of the official postwar Association of Shinto Shrines. It's also known for opposing gender equality laws.

In addition to the LDP, I'd hazard a guess that the group is right up significant proportions of the JIP's and PFG's respective alleys. Kōmeitō is almost definitely not on board for the most part, since the frisson of Shinto theocracy is anathema to Kōmeitō's unusually (for Japan) non-syncretistic form of Buddhism.

The chairman of the organization, Miyoshi Tōru, was Chief Justice of Japan from 1995 to 1997.